Jose Riesco, an international project manager in Engineering, Community and Online Support at Microsoft, is passionate about getting the word out about translations.

Jose Riesco, an international project manager in Engineering, Community and Online Support at Microsoft, is passionate about getting the word out about translations.

“Microsoft’s machine translation technology is best-in-class, and it gets better every day with the help of the community,” Jose said.

As manager of the Collaborative Translation Framework, a program which combines collaborative translation with customized machine translation, Jose has had a lot of opportunity to engage with the community.

Last summer, he travelled around Europe letting MVPs know about a new program on Support.Microsoft which enables people to review technical content in its original English and provide a better translation, if they have one. And then last February, he set up a booth at the MVP Global Summit to spread the word about the program and get MVP feedback.

Since then, he’s established a pilot program that provides MVPs with permission to serve as reviewers of the translations submitted by users of the Support.Microsoft site. “As experts in Microsoft technology and leaders in their community, MVPs seemed like a natural fit. They have full rights and responsibilities to make and approve translations. Nobody is going to second-guess them,” he explained.

“Although we’ve only reached out to a handful of MVPs so far, I’ve been impressed by their enthusiasm and collaboration. It’s been a pleasure to partner and work with them. Now that we can track their participation, we’re hoping to engage with many more MVPs in a wide range of languages so that they can improve machine translation for their respective languages and help people around the world make the most of their technology.”